Red Harvest

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This article deals with the Dashiell Hammett novel called Red Harvest. For the Norwegian heavy metal band, see: Red Harvest (band)

Red Harvest (1929) is a novel by Dashiell Hammett. The story is narrated by a nameless detective, The Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction. The Op's client is killed before the two men meet and, for reasons the reader can only guess, the Op decides to clean up the gang-filled city colloquially known as "Poisonville."

Raymond Chandler, who openly admired Dashiell Hammett, makes an oblique reference to Red Harvest in his novel Playback, in which a young, quasi-psychotic hitman tortures a private detective and comes close to killing Philip Marlowe. The redheaded tough is named "Richard Harvest" and by inference his nickname would be "Red" Harvest.

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Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The Continental Op finds himself called to Personville (which is pronounced "Poisonville" by the locals) by Donald Willsson, who is murdered before the Op has a chance to meet with him. The Op begins to work on the murder case and meets with Willsson's father, Elihu, a local industrialist who has found his control of the city's economy threatened by several competing gangs.

The Op extracts a promise and a signed letter from Elihu that pays the Op $10,000 in exchange for cleaning up the city. When the Op solves Donald's murder, Elihu tries to renege on the deal, but the Op won't allow him to do so.

In the meantime, the Op finds himself spending time with Dinah Brand, a possible love interest of Donald Willson's as well as a moll for the local gangster Max "Whisper" Thaler. Between Brand and the crooked chief of police Tim Noonan, the Op manages to extract and spread most of the information he needs to set off a gang war among the four major local factions.

One night at Brand's apartment, the Op passes out from a combination of alcohol and laudanum. He wakes up the next morning to find Brand stabbed to death with the icepick the Op had used that evening, with no visible signs of forced entry. The Op ends up a suspect sought by the police for this murder, and one of his fellow operatives ends up leaving Personville because he is unsure of the Op's innocence.

The story ends as the Op finds Reno Starkey, the only one of the four main gangsters still alive, bleeding from a gunshot wound, at which point Starkey reveals that he stabbed Brand, and that she died when she collided with the Op, driving the icepick through her chest. Reno has also just killed Whisper, and after his own death, Elihu can restore his control over the town.

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Film adaptations

Red Harvest has only been adapted into a film one time, for the 1930 film Roadhouse Nights, starring Jimmy Durante. However, many major elements of the book were changed for the movie, including most of the characters' names, and the film is not considered a faithful adaptation.

It has been frequently asserted--though never officially corroborated--that the plot was the inspiration for Yojimbo, a 1961 film by Akira Kurosawa. Yojimbo was later remade as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), a spaghetti western directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood; A Fistful of Dollars was in turn remade as a 1920s-era "gangster" movie in Last Man Standing (1996), starring Bruce Willis.

The film Miller's Crossing (1990) by the Coen brothers contains stylistic and narrative elements of The Glass Key as well as Red Harvest and several other Hammett works. The Coens' film Blood Simple (1984) takes its title from a line in Red Harvest where the Op tells Brand that the escalating violence has affected his mental state: "This damned burg's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simple like the natives."

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